Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the presence of the Minister for the Environment and Water here today. With regard to her opening remarks, I'm sure her South Australian colleagues are very pleased with the fact that her government is taking productive water that provides employment and amenity from the northern basin in my electorate in attempt to gain votes in South Australia, despite the fact that in many cases they are terminal streams and they can't be delivered!

With regard to water buybacks, Minister, we know that in the Macquarie and Gwydir valleys the northern basin review showed that they'd been over-recovered, largely because of the purchase Senator Wong made in the previous Labor government from the Twynam Pastoral Company in those two valleys. The review showed that the Macquarie Valley was about 38½ gigalitres over-recovered, and from memory I think the Gwydir is about nine gigalitres over-recovered. Can the minister tell the House, is that water going to be returned to the productive pool to enable those communities to actually have some sort of economic advantage? Or is that water going to be rolled into the 450 gigalitres that wasn't part of the plan that came in at the 2013 election? The minister's shaking his head. I should point out I did vote for the plan originally. I did not vote for the 450 gigalitres. It was not part of the plan. It's one of the misconceptions that gets put in this place, that the 450 was part of the plan. It is not. What does the minister intend to do with that over-recovered water?

With regard to Wilcannia, I'm sure the minister is well aware of the issue with the new weir. The previous government allocated $15 million and the state government allocated $15 million. Last year, before Christmas, the state government in New South Wales changed the design of that weir so that it's no longer going to raise the water level by an extra metre, despite the fact that the local community, the local land council, the floodplain graziers, the Central Darling Shire Council are all on a unity ticket for the need for this. We hear a lot of words in this place about our care and love and support for Indigenous communities. This is a project that will actually incredibly increase the amenity of that community by giving them a more reliable water supply. Don't get me wrong; I understand it's a state decision. My question is: has the New South Wales government approached the Commonwealth with more funding to build that weir to its original height? If they have, how much money have they asked for? If that was the case, if the New South Wales government did request more funding, would the minister be prepared to support that project?

There has been some clutching at straws in the briefings I've had around environmental impacts of going higher. This will not take the river outside the bank. In actual fact, the normal rise and fall of the river due to flows is probably higher than that extra metre. There was an attempt to find some Indigenous heritage items which did not, and so it does seem that there is some form of policy directive within the New South Wales bureaucracy around putting weirs in rivers. I'd like the minister's opinion on that.

With regard to buybacks in general, how much of the 450 gigalitres that the minister has promised to get is now removing the need for the triple bottom line with the environmental, social and economic disadvantage being removed from that? How much of the 450 gigalitres is the minister hoping to purchase from the northern basin, despite the fact that from the top end of my electorate you'd need to purchase 16 megalitres of water to get one megalitre of water across the border into South Australia?

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